April 2026 TLDR setup for Ollama + Gemma 4 on a Mac mini (Apple Silicon) — auto-start, preload, and keep-alive
- Mac mini with Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3/M4/M5)
- At least 16GB unified memory for Gemma 4 (default 8B)
- macOS with Homebrew installed
April 2026 TLDR setup for Ollama + Gemma 4 on a Mac mini (Apple Silicon) — auto-start, preload, and keep-alive
For some reason, it is surprisingly hard to create a bootable Windows USB using macOS. These are my steps for doing so, which have worked for me in macOS Monterey (12.6.1) for Windows 10 and 11. After following these steps, you should have a bootable Windows USB drive.
You can download Windows 10 or Windows 11 directly from Microsoft.
After plugging the drive to your machine, identify the name of the USB device using diskutil list, which should return an output like the one below. In my case, the correct disk name is disk2.
I was talking to a coworker recently about general techniques that almost always form the core of any effort to write very fast, down-to-the-metal hot path code on the JVM, and they pointed out that there really isn't a particularly good place to go for this information. It occurred to me that, really, I had more or less picked up all of it by word of mouth and experience, and there just aren't any good reference sources on the topic. So… here's my word of mouth.
This is by no means a comprehensive gist. It's also important to understand that the techniques that I outline in here are not 100% absolute either. Performance on the JVM is an incredibly complicated subject, and while there are rules that almost always hold true, the "almost" remains very salient. Also, for many or even most applications, there will be other techniques that I'm not mentioning which will have a greater impact. JMH, Java Flight Recorder, and a good profiler are your very best friend! Mea
| Add the `replication` section to the mongod.conf file: | |
| ``` | |
| $cat /usr/local/etc/mongod.conf | |
| systemLog: | |
| destination: file | |
| path: /usr/local/var/log/mongodb/mongo.log | |
| logAppend: true | |
| storage: | |
| engine: mmapv1 |
FWIW: I (@rondy) am not the creator of the content shared here, which is an excerpt from Edmond Lau's book. I simply copied and pasted it from another location and saved it as a personal note, before it gained popularity on news.ycombinator.com. Unfortunately, I cannot recall the exact origin of the original source, nor was I able to find the author's name, so I am can't provide the appropriate credits.
Principles of Adult Behavior
| # Install QEMU OSX port with ARM support | |
| sudo port install qemu +target_arm | |
| export QEMU=$(which qemu-system-arm) | |
| # Dowload kernel and export location | |
| curl -OL \ | |
| https://github.com/dhruvvyas90/qemu-rpi-kernel/blob/master/kernel-qemu-4.1.7-jessie | |
| export RPI_KERNEL=./kernel-qemu-4.1.7-jessie | |
| # Download filesystem and export location |